ImageDisk project is canceled

[Jules Richardson]

Christer O. Andersson wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 20, 2005 at 02:16:35PM +0000, Jules Richardson wrote:
>> Christer O. Andersson wrote:
>>> They could help with ImageDisk if the source was available.
>> It *is* available. It's just not downloadable from any website because it's 
>> not considered by the author to yet be polished enough for people to be 
>> adding their own features and working on collaborative development.
> 
> That makes it almost avaiable. Dave admitted it to be a mistake to
> mention "NDA", and I agree. If the code is polished enough for
> people to use, it ought to be polished enough to read.

Yep, but there's a difference between merely reading it, and with making 
changes to it in the form of additional features which then get released - all 
  when the author doesn't consider the 'core' of the application to yet be in 
some form of 'production' state. That could lead to all sorts of nasty 
branching issues as time goes on.

>>>>  Dave Dunfield is producing working tools, *free of charge*.  He's 
>>>> taking suggestions for features and fixes, he's made his image format 
>>>> freely available.  But it's his, to do with and to distribute as he 
>>>> pleases.
>>> And that is a problem. If you rely on his tools, and find it
>>> malfunctions in some way, you cannot fix the problem without the
>>> source. If Dave is not supporting his tool anymore for some reason,
>>> your stuck. Your saved disk might be lost. If the source is available
>>> you can either fix it yourself or arrange with somebody to fix it
>>> for you.
>> But, yet again, source *is* available, and Dave made that clear early on. I 
>> really don't get why so many people seem to be missing that point.
>>
> The "NDA" makes it impossible to share the source, whether you have
> made any improvements yourself, or if you want to ask somebody else
> to help you modify something due to a bug somewhere. You are not
> allowed to do that.

Yep. But Dave doesn't strike me as the sort of person who'd be against 
incorporating features / bugfixes back into the core code if they benefit the 
project - he just wanted *for now* to try and maintain the direction in which 
the project was heading to avoid any fragmentation. When the software works 
with a file format that's hoped to become sort of standard, that probably 
becomes even more important.